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No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

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Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#121

Post by sebastiennight »

danielfalbo wrote: post #65

We just need to go back at reading books in libraries

I've written a 125,000-word book a year before GPT-3 was a thing.

If this book came out today, in 2025, how would you know that the 420 pages are actually worth your time and not just a bunch of hallucinated LLM slop?

I've been wondering whether Wikipedia and libraries in 2030 will be in a better overall place quality-wise, or will just be overrun.

The last few times I looked for information on YouTube (by typing a keyword phrase or question instead of looking up a specific channel/creator), most of the top results were AI-narrated presentations. Some of those were filled with comments of people correcting obvious mistakes in the content (which as a layperson I would not have seen as mistakes)

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#123

Post by teemur »

watwut wrote: post #27
kleiba wrote: post #13

The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches. However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum us…

AI will kill the volunteers run websites and blogs faster then it will kill corporate ones. It will kill free information first. It will basically finish the process google search engine started when it started to require seo to find stuff. People will have less or no motivation to create them, because well, why would they? It will be just a food for AI of some corporation. And more importantly, people won't be findi…

> People will have less or no motivation to create them

Not sure if we surf the same internets... In the web I am surfing, the more "motivation" (trying to get ad revenue) the author has, the crappier the content is. If I want to find high quality information, invariably I am seeking authors with no "motivation" whatsoever to produce the content (wikipedia, hacker news, reddit with a heavy filter etc.) I'm pretty sure we would be better off if the whole ad industry vanished.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#124

Post by neehao »

As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the equilibrium.

"Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers to search queries than link to sites with the answers) poses new (reasonable) questions about fair use. By not sharing the proceeds, such systems also kill the incentives to produce original content on which they rely. For instance, if we don’t incentivize content producers, e.g., people who respond to Stack Overflow questions, the ability of these models to answer questions in new areas is likely to be lower. The concern about fair use can be addressed by training on data from content producers who have opted to share their data. The second problem is more challenging. How do you build a system that shares proceeds with content producers?"

https://www.gojiberries.io/generative-ai-and-the-market-for-...

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#125

Post by observationist »

neehao wrote: post #124

As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the equilibrium. "Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers to search queries than link to sites with the answers) poses…

Content producers that publish their "content" to the public web aren't entitled to dictate what's done with that material.

There's a simple solution. People that publish things can put up a paywall and people can pay what the content is worth.

The thing that AI endangers is not valuable content, it's the SEO clickbait cashcow, and as far as I'm concerned, the faster AI kills that off, the better.

That monetization model is corrupt as hell, produces all sorts of perverse incentives, and is the epitome of the enshittification of the web.

Burn, baby, burn.

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#126

Post by krupan »

BinaryIgor wrote: post #91

Interesting take on the future of web incentives; even before LLMs, I was often wondering how sustainable the ads model is - it obviously has a ton of tradeoffs. Maybe we will just go back to pay content as it was before the Internet era? Magazines and such

Magazines and such had a lot of ads too

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#127

Post by blharr »

verdverm wrote: post #86
roblh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is just absolutely worthless for this. Any question that gets asked gets buried in days if not hours. It pretty much guarantees the same basic garbage gets repeated over and over and over forever. Basically the exact opposite of stack overflow.

There are question/answer channels, not everything is chat on Discord

Those are not easily searchable either

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#128

Post by bgwalter »

observationist wrote: post #125
neehao wrote: post #124

As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the equilibrium. "Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers to search queries than link to sites with the answers) poses…

Content producers that publish their "content" to the public web aren't entitled to dictate what's done with that material. There's a simple solution. People that publish things can put up a paywall and people can pay what the content is worth. The thing that AI endangers is not valuable content, it's the SEO clickbait cashcow, and as far as I'm concerned, the faster AI kills that off, the better. That monetization m…

Of course they are entitled. They have the copyright, so you cannot reproduce it anywhere by default and the "fair" use issue is not settled.

Valuable content is endangered because writers feel demotivated it their material is just stolen by overfunded big corporations.

Paywalls only work for known publications and not for someone who writes the perfect tutorial on how to solve boot issues in Debian. Why would anyone write that if it's just stolen and monetized without attribution?

Re: No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search

#129

Post by _Algernon_ »

observationist wrote: post #125
neehao wrote: post #124

As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the equilibrium. "Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers to search queries than link to sites with the answers) poses…

Content producers that publish their "content" to the public web aren't entitled to dictate what's done with that material. There's a simple solution. People that publish things can put up a paywall and people can pay what the content is worth. The thing that AI endangers is not valuable content, it's the SEO clickbait cashcow, and as far as I'm concerned, the faster AI kills that off, the better. That monetization m…

Publishing publicly doesn't surrender copyright…
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